An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard.

After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing.

A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper.

This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.

..once upon a time, hubby was working with "Math geeks" from CalTechUniv....they were trying to measure something for a concrete pour....they were trying, we're talking hours, to calibrate down to the well, "nanosecond" of measuring.

....hubby, who saw that the concrete was close to 'drying' inside the truck, told the scientists, much to their precision-minded horror, to step back. He started to pour the cement, and told the scientists: "when you measure for concrete, there's a reason why our rulers only go to a 1/4 of an inch (about 3- 4mm).:)